


Century's End

by lost_spook



Category: Poldark (1975), Poldark - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Historical, Post-Series, Post-The Angry Tide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-26
Updated: 2013-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-16 05:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/858604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some strange chance or quirk of fate grants Ross's wish that he and Demelza never be parted by death...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Century's End

**Author's Note:**

> AU from the end of the 1970s TV series/The Angry Tide/1799 (though it's been a long while since I've read the books, so I am mainly referencing the BBC series).
> 
> I was generating some prompts for my own amusement, using some random characters, when I got "Ross Poldark, fountain of youth & contemporary AU" and then this happened. I'm not as sorry as I should be (though mildly sorry that it's not as exciting as such a premise could be, and that there really isn't more than a cameo from Dwight and Caroline).
> 
> It is sad, though, that I wrote a Poldark AU and it still didn't have any pirates.

“There shall come a time, Demelza, when I shall never hear your voice again, or you mine. I find that intolerable.” So Ross had said the night before, the night that Elizabeth died.

That, on the very next morning, a woman had come to the door at Nampara, selling water she said was from a blessed well, or possibly from a fountain where the pixies lived, that would hold back age and death, seemed like an odd sort of joke, so they bought one of the small bottles from her (water from the nearest well or stream, no doubt, Demelza had said, checking it was nothing worse) and drank it both as a jest, and as a pledge.

Nobody noticed anything for long enough after. Why should they? What was there to notice? But, in time, Demelza was careless with a knife in the kitchen, and found that the cut healed before she even had time to call for Prudie. There were other incidents, they both noticed after, and no further grey hairs arrived on their heads.

It wasn’t until Caroline asked, somewhere between amused and envious, how it was Demelza kept her face and figure so well, that they had to think about it, and what it might mean. There were other remarks after, and some of them less kind. There were always those who’d whisper about witchcraft, even in this century, and especially in the West Country, where such traditions died hard.

Even with the evidence they’d both collected over the years, it was hard to believe. It went against the grain for both of them. Death, Demelza had said, that same night, is only what everyone who’s ever lived has had to face. It was a certainty. She was too practical to think immortality could be thrust upon her. No matter how little changed in herself and in Ross, it still seemed like nonsense. Ross was not one to believe in superstition, either, but at last they both had to confront the fact such as it was: since that day in late 1799, neither one of them had aged by a hair or line, nor could anything injure them.

And once they had faced it, they had to act. They must leave, Ross decided, though it pained him more than he could admit: Cornwall was his home, Nampara his inheritance, and he liked the idea of leaving either, and with them their friends, their family, their children – Jeremy and Clowance – no more than she did. They had their plans, as ever, and he his political career, but a long and cold look in the glass made it plain how dangerous it could be to stay.

It took months more for Demelza to accept it (she would brave the accusations, as she always had! And it was no matter, anyhow; it wasn’t possible!), but she recognised the truth of it, in the end, and they agreed to leave England altogether. They thought of telling Dwight and Caroline, but it was not something that could easily be explained even to their closest friends. Ross did at least let Dwight know they were not coming back.

“I cannot explain,” he said. “Would that it were possible – suffice it to say that the reason is private and that it is essential we must go.”

Dwight said, “I knew something was wrong, of course, but this…”

“You and Caroline, you will keep a watchful eye on Jeremy and Clowance?”

“That does not even need to be said,” Dwight returned. “Ross, I will not pry if you won’t tell, but –”

“ _Cannot_ tell,” said Ross again. “Oh, don’t worry, Dwight, I’m not on the run from the law, not this time. It’s an impossible situation. There is nothing else to be done. You would not imagine that either of us would leave without it being the only course of action?”

“No.” Dwight nodded. “Caroline only said this morning that Demelza had not been herself for some time. I had been thinking the same about you.”

Ross gave a short smile, and moved away from the chimney breast. “Yes, you could very well say that. We are not ourselves any more, that’s the difficulty.”

 

They set sail for America, where no one should know them. Though it would be best, Ross said, just to be certain of that, to avoid the places he had visited before in the Revolutionary War.

Demelza was withdrawn throughout the voyage, and Ross feared he’d brought a double curse down on their heads with his unwise wish: to be unaging and never need to lose each other through death, yet to lose each other more surely because of this fate. He found her, determined to face that fear also, and reminded her of the other promise they’d made – that it should never be between them again as it had been in London.

“No, and it shan’t,” she said, to his relief, when he dared to ask her. “But ‘tis a painful loss, Ross. I didn’t think I ever could leave them, and not like this. I’ll be ready when we arrive, but now’s the time to look back. I must grieve for them, and for our home. It mayn’t be death, but perhaps ‘tis worse.”

Ross took her hand, and nodded. “Yes. Perhaps it is worse.”

 

So he found other things to occupy himself with on the voyage across the Atlantic: planning a possible business venture with a fellow passenger, and complaining frequently to the Captain about the disgraceful conditions in steerage and ensuring what precious little that could be done in the middle of an ocean on board an inadequate vessel was done.

The proposed venture never came to anything and after drifting here and there, doing the best they could, and finding it harder than they had anticipated to live life on the edges, Ross especially, they travelled West with many others.

That was adventure enough, for a while, a challenge that appealed to both in many ways, but Demelza missed the sea. She’d never been away for longer than a few visits here and there, to London, or elsewhere in Cornwall. She hadn’t known, she said, how much it was in her bones and blood, and that she couldn’t breathe freely without it. And they’d both been at odds with some of the other settlers nearby – neither of them cared for brutality or injustice, and wouldn’t stand by and see the law taken into other people’s hands when mercy was called for. Ross didn’t agree with the treatment of the people who were native to this new world, either, and that, Demelza found, was likely to get them into trouble that would soon have them noticed. Nobody was going to be happy to see someone they’d shot or hanged get back up again.

They’d thought, then, maybe they could return to England. It had been a few decades, and if they found a quiet corner somewhere well away from Cornwall, no one would know who they were, but once they did the danger of discovery seemed ever present, this land so much smaller than they had remembered, and then Demelza found an advertisement in the paper, offering passage to Australia, and since there was no reason to stay, they went.

There Ross’s mining experience proved useful and they did well enough, though they were still too far from the sea for Demelza’s liking and in too harsh a climate and sometimes too lawless a land.

“Is England so much better after all?” Ross had countered when she said as much. “I think you are forgetting all the abuse of privilege – the constant centuries of ingrained injustice and ignorance –”

“Very true. I’m only thinking of the bay by Nampara,” she said, “and Sawle Church, and wondering what Jeremy and Clowance may be doing now, where they might be. You are right, of course, but ‘tis hard, Ross. I think it will be no matter how long it’s been – or will be.”

Ross sat down with her. “But we have each other – you and I together, as you said. Isn’t that enough?”

“It has to be,” she said, and then gave him a quick smile, and tugged mischievously at his shirt. “It cannot cure me from missing the sea, though ‘tis comfort for a good many other ills.”

“We’re prospering here,” said Ross. “No one knows us, and we’ve a while yet before –”

“Before anyone notices our unnatural state?” she put in, grimacing at him. “Yes, I know how it is. And as long as we’re careful of accidents – as much as we can be.”

“None of this is ideal,” he said. “But in a few years to come, when we’ve money from this business, we can go home again. Time enough will have passed by then.”

 

From the business there, it became perfectly natural years on that Ross should follow a friend’s recommendation and leave to join in another mining venture, this time in Africa, in the Cape Colony.

“Well, ‘tis a little nearer home,” said Demelza. “That shall have to content me for now.”

“Think of it as a wayside stop,” Ross said, with a smile.

 

It was more than a wayside stop, since there was a terrible storm at sea and they the only survivors, the two who couldn’t drown, though they managed to cling to a piece of the wreckage together, and were washed up on an island.

And when Demelza said then that it was going to be a very long time before they went anywhere again, let alone to England, Ross pointed out that she was proving a very difficult wife to please, as he had at least provided her with all the ocean she could wish for.

“That isn’t in the least bit amusing,” she said, on her dignity for, oh, five minutes or more.

 

They managed as best as they could, finding what they could to eat, and making a shelter from the wreckage, though Ross did wonder for a frightening moment, how well starvation and immortality would combine and what it might make of them. They set up a beacon, and, despite Demelza’s fears, proved to be near to the shipping lanes, and rescue was mercifully swift in coming.

It was still months too late to meet Ross’s friend’s acquaintance in Cape Town, but perhaps that was as well – continued contact with the people who’d known them too long, even at second hand, was too dangerous. From there, they followed the lure of gold to the Transvaal, but the effects of greed on human nature and the politics surrounding the business were not what they cared for, so they left to sink their fortunes into another mining enterprise, a supposed diamond mine. It wasn’t, and they would have ended the century as ruined by that as they had been by copper, if it hadn’t been for the sale of the mine, to a wealthy businessman who wouldn’t believe it was worthless. And if he must delude himself, Ross said, he could certainly afford it, and perhaps if one looked in the right place, it’d prove true. In any case, it gave them their passage home at last – time enough had passed that they need not fear discovery back in England.

 

“It’s nearly 1900,” said Demelza, spreading the London paper out on the breakfast table in front of them. They had permitted themselves one night in a hotel, and then they could return to Cornwall at long last. She wasn’t sure now whether she could bear it, if the pain and the pleasure of it together might be too much for her.

London itself was a odd sort of place: alien now in some ways, and yet in others the same as ever – still noisy, busy and dirty, only even worse than before, and foggier too.

“I had noticed,” Ross said, in response to her announcement. 

“No, I didn’t mean it that way. I hadn’t thought of it before – I don’t know why. It’s been a hundred years now, Ross, as near as makes no difference. You and I, like this.”

Ross frowned over at her. “What of it?”

“Well, I did think,” said Demelza, “that curses and spells and suchlike are supposed to break after a hundred years.”

“Do you think such happenings have rules and laws?” He was curious, rather than mocking.

“Most things do, so it stands to reason. It’s only that we don’t know what they are, they happen to so few folk.”

“What made you think of it?” he asked.

Demelza leant forward, as if it were a great secret. “I caught a grey hair this morning – and that hasn’t happened since before this all began.”

“That’s too little to build your hopes upon,” he said, laughing at her, and pulling lightly at the ends of her red curls. “One more grey hair every hundred years, perhaps that’s all it means.”

“Perhaps.”

Ross looked away from her. “Do you ever think, instead, that we shall go on – roaming the earth for as long as the world remains?”

“No,” said Demelza, and he raised his head sharply at her certainty. “Everything ends, Ross. And if it is only one more grey hair every fifty or a hundred years and not that this curse has been broken, then it’s still a sign of an ending to come. And I think I am right. There’s other things I’d noticed, but I hadn’t given thought to them – hadn’t dared as yet.”

“If you’re right?”

She smiled, and put both her hands over his arm on the table. “Then we shall go home and age and die – and _live_ , like everyone else does.”

“Never, I fear, quite like everyone else,” he said, amused. “We never did achieve that, did we?”

Demelza laughed. “No, we never did.”

“Do you forgive me?” he asked at last, as if he’d been holding his breath for that whole century.

“What’s to forgive?” she asked, frowning at him. “Ross? What is it you’ve done?”

“No, love,” he said, leant over to kiss her, but then drew back again, so that she could see he was serious. “For this, I meant – for bringing this curse down upon us.”

Demelza faced him. “It wasn’t intended. We both thought it a joke. It isn’t your fault, any more than ‘tis mine. I never knew that you were a magician, so how could it be? Neither of us knew what would come of it. There’s nothing to forgive, Ross. Not for this.”

“I made the wish.”

“We’ll be as everyone else is now,” she said, leaning forward again. “I know it in my bones.”

“And face death as a certainty?”

“Yes,” said Demelza, and throwing him a challenging look, “we shall. And part, since you must be tired of the same wife after a hundred years – that’s a certainty too.”

“True,” said Ross. “I must find a new one as soon as we return home, and you a more careful husband.”

She shot him a look.

“If it were a thousand years,” he said, “I’d still rather it were you I faced it with, Demelza.”

“Heaven forbid,” she said. “Don’t say such a thing.”

Ross laughed, and shook off the odd mood, as he caught hold of her, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her nearer to him. “No, you’re right. And perhaps you’re right about our fate, too. And if that’s so, it occurs to me that time is precious after all – we shouldn’t waste it.”

“Oh, I do agree,” said Demelza, at her most solemn, and then she kissed him fiercely in return. “We’ve been taking what we have for granted, no doubt. We should never do that, Ross.”

“No, never,” he said, and pulled her up and away from the table, into his hold.

She gave him an impish look. “I’m afraid I’d be powerful jealous of that new wife of yours, Ross.”

“And I of your careful husband.”

“Then we had best stay together,” she said. “If only to save them from the trouble we’d bring them.”

Ross kissed her again. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”


End file.
